Category: Previous Issues Articles

Monday was the 70th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, including “the right to health” which now has a stable place in the Paris preamble. But, where is health at this COP? In spite of the significance of health to humanity, it has not been incorporated into the language of the Rulebook.

Why should the COP outcome include a reference to health? There are two reasons. First, climate change has severe impacts on our health and is likely to have increasing impacts as the Earth warms further; heat exposure resulted in 153 billion hours of labour lost around the world in 2017, an increase of more than 62 billion hours since 2000. Secondly, climate change mitigation can have a major positive impact on health. For example, air pollution currently kills 7 million people worldwide every year. It also causes significant health problems such as asthma and respiratory issues.

When countries try to avoid ambitious mitigation targets because of economic reasons, they fail to recognise the economic benefits of improved health from reducing air pollution. Mitigation pathways identified in the IPCC 1.5°C report typically show that there are significant synergies for reducing air pollution, and that these synergies increase with the stringency of the mitigation policies.

Today ECO returns to the highly motivating, yet alarming findings of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C: to limit global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society – and in doing so we can bring clear benefits to people and ecosystems.

According to the Report, limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared with 2°C would reduce impacts on ecosystems, human health and well- being, making it easier to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society. In contrast, exceeding 1.5°C means grave risks for people and vulnerable systems around the globe.

The Report also highlights a number of climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2°C or more. For instance, by 2100, global coral reefs, and rapidly escalating risk sea-level rise would be 10 cm lower. The likelihood of an Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer would be once per century compared with at least once per decade. As ECO explained yesterday coral reefs would decline by 70–90% with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all (>99%) would be lost with 2°C.

The UK’s groundbreaking Climate Change Act is now 10 years old. This piece of legislation was a global first in setting up a legally-binding 2050 climate target — broken down into five-year emissions budgets to allow for political accountability and responsiveness to new science. It also established an independent statutory advisory body: the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), to bring climate science directly to policymakers and hold government to account for those budgets.

While the Act remains an excellent framework, its target is in need of an update — especially in light of the IPCC 1.5oC Special Report.

ECO is delighted to note that the UK Minister has taken the first step towards increasing the UK’s long term ambition – and potentially the nearer-term carbon budgets. She has formally asked the CCC to give advice on how the UK can get to net-zero, and by when ECO hopes that this will be by 2045 – which a recent report showed was possible; we await the CCC’s analysis, due by in March/April 2019. This means the UK will be in a good position to enhance its NDC by 2020, perhaps even in line with 1.5oC – as all countries should aim to do.

ECO welcomes New Zealand coming in from its years in the wilderness and finally accepting that carrying over old and dodgy credits from previous commitment periods of the Kyoto Protocol is a bad idea.

New Zealand has quite the stash of these, but Minister for Climate Change James Shaw has confirmed to Australian media that carrying over these credits would make it challenging for the world to achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement. ECO is pleased to agree with the Minister, that this would be a bad idea.

This is a refreshing change, especially from a country that previously earned infamy for its creative accounting.

All eyes remain on Australia, which is silent on whether it will follow suit, and whether the Paris Rulebook will end up allowing it to do so. Australia expects a surplus of around 300 million tonnes of carbon credits by 2020. ECO suspects that it plans to use these to meet its Paris Agreement target without having to cut emissions.

It is these kinds of loopholes we expect the Paris Rulebook to close.

ECO looks forward to the Minister continuing with this positive, loophole-slaying attitude as he co-chairs Article 6 negotiations in the coming days.

We should really talk about that thing. You know, the crisis facing the planet.

It’s important, right? We’ve talked about it a lot already.

Maybe we think so, but there seem to be some who don’t …

Parties agreed at COP23 that the Talanoa Dialogue would be designed to enhance ambition. However, that spirit seemed to have escaped some parties in their interventions in the Talanoa Dialogue events yesterday. There was perhaps no Party that seemed more dead set against ambition in Talanoa than Egypt.

Despite the IPCC findings that current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) put us on track to 3oC warming or more, and the numerous calls at COP24 for urgently scaled-up actions and targets before 2020, Egypt made it clear they had no interest in discussing more ambitious NDCs before 2020.

Today the European Commission will present its new draft long-term climate strategy for the European Union to the COP. ECO is pleased to have gotten an early look, and is breathing a sigh of relief because the European Commission recognises the need to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C.

We are also pleased to see the proposal for the EU to go to net-zero emissions by 2050. This proposal is a welcome shift, given that the European Commission has spent the last three years implementing legislation that would bring EU emissions down by only around 80% by 2050.

This new net-zero proposal would bring EU emissions down by around 93% by 2050, which is the upper end of the range that was identified by the IPCC in 2007, and was endorsed by the EU in the run up to Copenhagen. And ECO has been advised that the word ‘by’ actually means ‘at the latest’.

The IPCC 1.5°C report reveals that the pathways that limit the chances of overshooting 1.5°C and avoid heavy reliance on carbon removal in the second half of this century require global greenhouse gas emissions to reach net-zero by 2044.

ECO would also like to remind the EU and other developed country Parties that they have agreed to continue to lead on climate action.

Today, the political phase of the Talanoa Dialogue begins, starting with Ministerial Roundtables. ECO is looking forward to hearing Ministers tell stories from the real world – sharing views on the significance of the IPCC special report on 1.5o (SR1.5) and how this COP needs to respond.

In honour of the Oceans Action Day, which took place this past weekend, ECO thought it would highlight one such story about the real world of marine ecosystems and the difference between 1.5o and 2oC of warming. Brace yourself, dear ECO readers, as it is a grim one. At 2oC, coral reefs will likely be annihilated. Gone. Toasted. Wiped out of existence. At 1.5o, enough of the reefs may survive so that they can be rehabilitated and brought back to health. Even with the current level of warming, a substantial proportion of coral reefs have experienced large-scale mortalities that are causing them to contract rapidly. In the last three years alone, large coral reef systems such as the Great Barrier Reef (Australia) have lost as much as 50 percent of their shallow-water corals.

The value of coral reefs cannot be overstated. Coral- dominated reefs are found between latitudes 30°S and 30°N along coastlines where they provide habitats for over a million species.